Stages: A Learner's Permit for Musical Theatre

BY Becky Brett

It’s hard to believe that Stages, Theatre Building Chicago’s musical theatre workshop weekend, is celebrating its 15^th anniversary. Next thing you know, it’ll be asking for the car keys and promising to be home by midnight. While Stages has gotten bigger and, presumably, better over the years, it will always represent a beginning—and a continuation.

Stages Festival is a writers’ festival, not a market place. It’s intended to help musical theatre writers develop their shows. As musical theatre becomes more of a local industry than a Broadway-centered product, it is important to develop local writers. “It’s probably the only quintessentially American art form. We invented it, so I think it’s important to keep it alive and to keep it current,” said Theatre Building Chicago artistic director John Sparks.

Sparks started the workshop at TBC, though he was living in L.A. at the time. He met TBC founders Ruth Higgins and Byron Schaffer when they produced a show he wrote called Babes in Barns. Higgins and Schaffer had been wanting to start a workshop like the one Sparks was running in L.A., so they invited him to come work with musical theatre writers in Chicago. He made it out to the Midwest once a month for a few days at a time until 1999, when Joan Mazzonelli, executive director of TBC, invited him to take over as artistic director. He now evenly splits his time between Chicago and L.A., where he still serves as artistic director of the Academy for New Music Theatre.

Sparks shared some of his highlights from the past 15 years of new musicals at TBC. “My personal favorite in terms of work that we presented in the festival is the show that was called Bringers, now called Dust and Dreams, [which is] a celebration of Carl Sandburg. I was very proud of the work itself and I was very proud of the work in the Stages Festival.”

He also recalled with fondness a production of I Sent a Letter to My Love, which was directed by Patricia Birch—a Broadway director and choreographer, multiple Drama Desk winner and multiple Tony nominee for choreography. “We were able to supply Kevin Earley in one of the roles before his career took off.”

In fact, Sparks noted, “There are many, many stories where a writer or an actor has been connected to the program, and it has somehow taken off for them. Sometimes it happens because somebody sees the show and sometimes it happens because somebody hears about the show. There isn’t a single pipeline for a musical to get it from the typewriter to the audience.”

This year four new musicals-in-progress will receive workshop performances at the Stages Festival, and Sparks noted that they are each different stylistically, representing the array of musical theatre styles now blossoming around the nation. “The form is in flux,” he said. “Nowadays you go to a musical and you don’t know what you’re going to get. You may get four people, two chairs and a telephone and a keyboard. There’s a lot of innovation.”

For example, according to Sparks, Belle Barth: If I Embarrass You, Tell Your Friends (book by Joanne Koch, lyrics by Owen Kalt, music by Ilya Levinson) is told in the style of a stand-up comic routine. Another piece, Here on this Hill (book by Edward M. Cohen, lyrics by Edward M. Cohen and Marshall Coid, music by Marshall Coid), is described as a non-linear telling of the events in the lives of a dysfunctional family. “It’s very theatrical and unmusical-like,” said Sparks. “In some ways it masquerades as a traditional book-musical, but as you watch it, you see it has its own way of telling a story.”

Sparks described the other two shows as being closer in form to what we think of as a traditional Broadway musical. Take Me America (lyrics and libretto by Bill Nabel, music by Bob Christianson) is a timely and very contemporary story of nine refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. “I would compare it to Rent or Spring Awakening in its sensibilities,” Sparks noted. “It’s right out of the headlines. It’s being told in a recognizable musical theatre format, but it has its own twists on the form.”

Killala Bay (book and lyrics by Chris Burgess, music by Denise Wright) is based on a novel and has a more traditional shape. However, Sparks pointed out that audiences will be able to see Oscar Hammerstein’s influence on these shows. The writers wanted them to be about something important, and to have the book and the score integrated, but they’re all putting their personal stamp on it.

The Stages Festival runs August 15-17 at Theatre Building Chicago. For tickets and information visit www.theatrebuildingchicago.org or Ticketmaster (www.ticketmaster.com).